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Old-Timey: Who Uses Time Tracking

Have a little fun with this old-timey video. Who tracks there time in the modern world?

Consultants track their time. Client billing and profitability depend on it. Here’s an easy app to track your billable hours, and bill clients for those hours.

Engineers track their time. Find out how many engineering hours are spent on each project and task. Compare actuals with estimates. Find out which projects you’re spending the most time on, and compare that with your priorities.

Manufacturing companies track time. Learn how much time is spent on each product, on each product line, and each item. Employee timesheets and manufacturing barcode systems answer the questions of how much time, who, and where the time is spent. Are you meeting planned objectives?

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Quick Questions: Billable and Non-Billable Time

When you’re a consultant, you log billable hours. No big secret there. But you probably also log non-billable hours for internal or administrative non-project work. After all, you want to keep track of all your time, not just the client billable hours.

Each time log in ST has a checkbox for “Billable.” That let’s you select between client work, and internal work. Actually… you might perform non-billable work for a client, so this checkbox doesn’t clearly designate non-client work.

To clearly differentiate between client and non-client work, you should create a “client” for your own company. Any time you log internal hours, consider using your own company for that time. Set up internal admin projects that are assign to your own company. Create non-billable tasks for those admin projects. When you log time to those tasks (under those admin projects) you’ll be logging time to your company. The “Billable” checkbox will be unchecked, plus the client will be your own company. That fully resolves the internal-verses-external client question.  It also means that client invoices will never contain your internal time and expenses.

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Animated: Why Standard Time is Hot in Manufacturing

Guess what’s hot in manufacturing project tracking?

Barcode scanning. (scroll down for the video)

Turns out you can scan a few simple barcodes to track manufacturing time.  Scan your employee badge to let the system know who you are. Scan a task name to let it know which job or product you’re on. A timer records the exact starting time for the work. Scan the word “STOP” and the timer stops.

In those few scans, you have just collected the following information:

  1. How much time each employee takes to do their work
  2. How much time each product takes
  3. The total time for each product or package
  4. Average time for each kind of job

Manufacturing is all about efficiency and cost. A few barcodes may surprise you. You may be spending more time than you thought. Or certain jobs are costing you a lot more than you ever imagined. Or secondary jobs may be crowding out your core competencies. Without the exact time measurements, you may never know.

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Quick Questions: Categories for Time Tracking

Define the kinds of work you do with customizable lists. The items in this list are called Categories.

So what good are categories for time tracking? (the video below tells, or read on…)

Categories break your work down to the basics. How much time do your project team spend on design work? Development? Testing? Sales? Meetings? Categories can tell you that.

It doesn’t matter which projects you worked on. It doesn’t matter which client or task. For now, you just care about how much time is spent on each type of work. Do you spend more than 10% on admin? More than 5% on meetings? Notice that those things are not project related. How about more than 25% on design? Or 50% on development. Those items are project related, but you don’t care which project. You just want to know how much time is spent on the basic activity.

Assign categories to project tasks, and you will instantly know these breakdowns. You can even get a pie chart that shows the breakdown. That would probably be interesting to know!

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Quick Question: Customize Employee Rights

Did you know you can customize what employees can see and do in their timesheet?

Scroll down and watch the video…

You don’t have to let employees see all the time and expenses for other employees, and all the projects, and all the clients in your system. Instead, you can customize what they see and do. By default, all non-admins cannot see other employee hours. But you can cut that view down even further. You can assign projects and clients, so they see only the relevant ones. You can remove some of the other default views in the program, like Time Off, Project Tasks, and Billing. You can prevent certain project billing fields from being edited.

Those are the things you can do with user rights.

Choose Tools, Users and Organization. Right-click on a user and choose User Rights…

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Quick Questions: Quick Task Timer Window

Need to know exactly how long your projects are taking? Or how long tasks take? Or employees are working? There a timesheet feature for that. (scroll down to see it in action, and see the “deer slayer” explain everything)

The Quick Task window is your time tracking answer.

Every task that shows up in your timesheet also shows up in the Quick Task window. There is a checkbox next to each one. Ever seen it? Choose View, Quick Tasks to open the QT window. And just click the checkbox to start and stop the timer. That makes time tracking easy.

Do that for a while and see what happens.

You’ll quickly see how long you’re spending on projects. The actual start and stop times guarantee that. Reports will collect up all that project time and show the total. Or, you can click the Project Tasks tab to see each task total, and the project total at the top.

You’ll see a dozen other things in the Project Tasks tab worth checking out. Most of that information is based on the actual hours you collected when tracking task hours in the Quick Task window. Here are some of them: Actual work, percent complete, client cost, client actual cost.

So you see… this is more than just a time tracker!

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Quick Questions: Time Tracking for Mac

Yes, Standard Time® does run on Apple products. That includes the desktop-Mac, iPhone and iPad. The screens look just like the PC screens.

The video below shows Standard Time on a Safari web browser. You can track time and expenses, plus PTO and vacation accruals. Every timesheet and time tracking feature you might see on Windows or Linux is available on the Mac. And it runs as nice as any browser.

Just so you know, this is not a native Mac time tracking app. But it does work nicely on Safari browser on the Mac. The actual app is running on a Windows IIS Web server, and is being served up to any clients that wish to log in. Those clients could be Windows systems or Mac or Linux or any other. Windows is just the server, but any client can log in.

Standard Time does not have a native Mac app. But it does have a native iOS app that runs natively on iPhone and iPad. That version is available in the Apple Store. It’s not as functional as the version you see in the video below. The native iOS time tracking app is intended for short bursts of use while away from the office, like at client sites or at home. It syncs with the Web Edition you see here using web services over your data plan or Wi-Fi. All your time and expense records end up on the Windows Server database where they are available for reporting and decision-making.

Check out the Safari browser running Standard Time below.

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Quick Questions: Submitting Timesheets

If you’re in a consulting firm, you know that billable hours are your livelihood. Losing hours is not an option. Lose too many, and you’ll be consulting somewhere else. Every consultant must be utilized to the max, and every hour must be accounted for.

Time is money.                                                     scroll down for a video…

In that light, the management overhead of submitting and approving timesheets is a small price to pay for accurate billing. Think of it as another set of eyes on your most valuable asset — consultants, and their billable hours.

Managers can view a list of employees who have submitted their timesheets. Emails go out to those who have forgotten. Another email goes to managers, and lists employees who forgot. Now managers can check each timesheet and approve it.

What are they looking for? Correct time under clients, projects, tasks, and time periods.

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Quick Questions: Creating Project Tasks

Follow these simple steps to create a project task that is displayed in the timesheet.  Scroll down for a video.

Why track time with project tasks?  Because you will be tracking much more information that just a project. It takes the same amount of time to enter hours for a task as it does a project.  But a project task contains other information that you can use to better understand the execution of your project.

For instance, project tasks are associated with categories.  Each category describes the type of work you performed.  You can run reports or comparisons on categories.

Project tasks also contain other fields that differ from task to task.  So choosing the appropriate task means you are also choosing those other data point.  Again, use them in reports to learn more about where your time is spent.

Other useful association may exist, such as payroll information, estimates verses actuals, and link dependencies based on task completion, and warnings when tasks are nearly finished.

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Barcode Scanning for Manufacturing

During the manufacturing process you are able to keep track of the time spent on each product, follow your employees time and you’ll know how much time was spent on each task.

Just add a barcode label to your work orders or products.  Scan them during the manufacturing process.  And you’ll know how much time you spent per piece, per project, and per employee.  Use those numbers to reduce manufacturing time and increase efficiency.

Look for a free barcode font named IDAutomationHC39M_FREE.otf.  Install this and use MS Word to create barcodes.  Simply type *MyProject* into Word, and then change the font.  You’ll see a barcode label where your text was.

You’ll need to scan the employee name, a category, and the project.  This is enough information to start the timer in Standard Time®.  Then can the word “STOP” (without the quotations).  The timer will stop and you’ll have some new information you can begin to use to improve your business.